Intimacy and Atmosphere: Two Spring Shows in Dallas

Chloe Scout Nix: I Will Kill Your Daddy at Zeke’s Projects, March 15–April 26, 2025

Chloe Scout Nix’s solo exhibition at Zeke’s Projects in Dallas presents seventeen deeply personal works — sixteen photographs and one video — born from a summer of transition, reflection, and emotional excavation. Recently graduated from her MFA program, Nix marks a post-academic pivot with raw, emotionally dense images that investigate how we give and receive intimacy.

The photograph is at the heart of Nix’s project as both mirror and memory. She appears in every image, not only as the subject but also as the photographer, folding her body into carefully composed scenes with friends, exes, Tinder dates, and, in one resonant image, her own parents. Her presence in each frame intensifies the work’s vulnerability — it is as much about self-discovery as it is about visual documentation. The gestures are tender, awkward, familiar. The viewer becomes an unseen observer to what might feel like private moments, and yet there’s a performative quality too: intimacy as both real and staged.

What Nix captures is not eroticism, but the tension between closeness and observation — what it means to touch and be touched, literally and psychologically. These are not passive images of romance or affection. They are meditations on the origins of desire itself: learned through family, pop culture, heartbreak, and the digital residue of dating apps. Nix doesn’t just explore affection — she interrogates it.

The images are presented on thick, fabric-coated wooden panels, ranging from one to six inches deep. These sculptural substrates give the works a presence that pushes them off the wall, hovering somewhere between photography and object. Nix burns the edges of each panel to prevent fraying, creating delicate charred borders that signal both preservation and destruction. The act of burning, she explains, is practical — but its metaphorical weight is unavoidable. The singed edges speak to the impermanence of relationships, the traces they leave, and the artist’s own attempt to contain something inherently elusive.

This blend of vulnerability and craft is also reflected in her framing choices. Working with a Texas-based framer, she introduces new shapes and formats — triangle cut-outs and floating frames—that suggest a desire to break out of conventional compositional grids. These formal decisions reflect the emotional variety of her subjects: some images are calm, almost devotional; others are chaotic, full of limbs and uncertain expressions.

A notable component of the exhibition is a video work that anchors the show with movement and sound, adding another layer to her exploration of intimacy. While her still images freeze emotion in time, the video opens it up, letting it shift, breathe, and unfold.

This body of work is rooted in a summer that Nix calls her first real return to intentional making after the “grad school spiral.” The result is a remarkable debut that feels both immediate and meditative. It’s a project that resists the easy narratives of love and belonging, offering instead a landscape of affective gestures — some tender, some bruised, some still searching.

In a time when intimacy is often flattened by performance, algorithm, or routine, Chloe Scout Nix reminds us that our most personal gestures are never entirely ours alone. They’re inherited, echoed, reshaped by every person we’ve ever touched or been touched by. In that sense, her exhibition becomes more than a personal archive. It’s a collective mirror.  

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Em Davenport & Sasha Miasnikova: good consumer at Jessamine, Belmont Hotel, Dallas, April 9–May 10, 2025

No one’s really sure what’s going on with the Belmont Hotel anymore. A stuccoed ruin clinging to a hillside just west of downtown Dallas, it has stood dormant for years. Chalk-marked room doors read “leak,” “closet wall,” and other notes of architectural triage. The water still runs and the toilets flush, for now.

Into this slow decay, the curatorial project Jessamine has installed a two-person exhibition by Em Davenport and Sasha Miasnikova. Organized during the week of the Dallas Art Fair and situated in what used to be a guest suite, good consumer feels like a throwback to the unofficial, artist-run Dallas of the 2000s and 2010s: a city with a gift for reimagining private space into public platform, especially when there’s a view and a bar.  

The front room is more of an atmosphere than an exhibition — a collection of artworks by friends and previous collaborators of Jessamine, loosely “decorating” the space. The show proper begins in the second room with Davenport’s ghostlike figure compositions rendered in graphite on flattened perfume boxes and mounted on wood. These white paintings appear as fragmented bodies: the image of a person built across two or more surfaces, abstracted into scent packaging and negative space.  

Miasnikova’s paintings echo the same sense of temporal drift — faded floorboards, slumped or distorted figures, and half-remembered interiors. Initially easy to dismiss as naïve or quickly rendered, the longer you look, the more deliberate they become. In one canvas, a floor rendered in dusty brown gradients all but steals the scene.  

The Belmont might not last much longer in this form, but its image — part 1960s Hollywood glamour, part post-crash Texas real estate — lingers as context and material. Jessamine’s show doesn’t resist that mood. It sinks in.

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William Sarradet is the Assistant Editor of Glasstire.